Thank you very much CaptHilts, as for the usability of Unity I do not have any complaints on it. I made my self run it for about 3 weeks and got used to it. I still prefer Gnome-Shell over it but certainly could use Unity DE without issue.

Marc, I sure do like the way you are presenting your screenshots! Very professional and you make it easy for others to achieve the same professional look. Not only is your work really nice but I am sure it is a huge help getting people started with theming their own desktops. Great work!

Thank you very much Don, really means allot to hear that from you. I appreciate your kind words and I do hope these screenshots help someone who is looking to theme there Linux OS. Or even to move them to try Linux if they have not yet done so. Well thanks again my friend.

I'm a die-hard Mint 9 Isadora fan, and I recently had to completely rebuild my system because the hard drives finally succumbed to sector cancer. I'm glad Isadora's based on an LTS release; I'm going to stick with it for another 6 months or so, and wait for Cinnamon to become more feature-complete (read: "hopeful arrival of a Compiz-like 'Desktop Cube' effect with cylinder/sphere sub-effects").

After reinstalling Isadora, I decided to something a bit different, so I took Shiki-Wise and tweaked it into a sleek, your-eyes-roll-off-the-edges, dark theme. Note that the original screenshots are 1920x1200 pixels; loading the full-size screenshots across a slower connection may take a considerable amount of time.

I call this theme "Shiki Dark." Some items of interest:

The desktop environment is Gnome 2.30 with GTK-Window-Decorator and Compiz.

Changing the system colors to light text with a dark background has an interesting side-effect: Certain web page forms -- like those on Google's Picasaweb and Gmail login pages -- presume your system default font is a dark-colored font. This makes typing your user ID and password difficult, because the text in the form is invisible. Haven't figured out a good way around this problem, other than writing a GreaseMonkey script to rewrite web site CSS. Any ideas...?

My current desktop on Mint 12 (Gnome-Shell). Lots of extensions installed, a mish mash of themes and some custom css editing, and I've been tweaking around with conky. I like to go with a darker overall look. Nothing too special but I've finally hit an overall look that I'm happy with and I think I'll keep it for a while.